Included in these four downloads are two Neversink excerpts from larger publications of ours, Child’s Gazetteer of Sullivan County, and Quinlan’s History of Sullivan County. Some people have mentioned to us that these excerpts are easier to handle than the file representing the full book, and that they are happy to have them available to work with in this form. They’re short enough to print out, if you are more comfortable working from paper (as many of us secretly are!)

And, if you haven’t looked at our Neversink offerings recently, you might want to take a peek anyway — we have several items that we’ve added since the CD-ROM first came out that may be of interest to you. (Needless to say, we do hope you will check out these four Neversink downloads while you are there!)

Annals of Winchester, previously one of our best-selling CD-ROMs, had been unavailable since we discontinued our CD-ROM business to concentrate on low-cost, immediately available downloads.

However, we’ve had several requests for this classic, which, to anticipate a question we were asked many times about the CD, Annals of Winchester DOES include the history of Winsted.

If you are seeking historical information about the Town of Winchester, or Winsted, or the people who lived there and the businesses that made this an important manufacturing center, Annals of Winchester is pretty much the go-to source. It is indexed — and we have added an additional index of place names that we compiled — and, since it is in PDF format, easy to use on any computer.

There’s lots more information available on our Annals of Winchester page, so please have a look. If you considered buying the CD originally but were put off by the price tag, you will find that the download version is a small fraction of that amount — and has the advantage of being an immediate download, not something you have to wait a week or more for the Post Office to deliver.

We are happy to bring you the Kidwell family notebook and the history of Catholicity in Kentucky.

Well, these new Kentucky downloads are not new, really. The source material is old, because we republish old material that is out of print or, as in one case here, never previously published. It’s old in another sense because we used to offer it on a CD-ROM, back in the days when getting a CD-ROM in the mail was the modern way to get genealogical or historical information.

But as downloads, these two Kentucky items, the Kidwell Family Notebook and Kentucky Catholicity, are indeed new.

First off, there’s some extraordinary genealogy. We were very fortunate to inherit Stella Mulholland Bogner’s Kidwell family notebook. The intrepid Mrs. Bogner documented this large family from its origins in St. Mary’s County, Maryland and its migration to Kentucky as part of the Roman Catholic diaspora that followed the Revolutionary War. It’s first publication ever was on our discontinued CD-ROM, but continued requests made it essential that we make it available as a download. We’ve indexed it, and added a collection of Kidwells who appear in the 1850 US Census of Kentucky.

CLICK HERE to go to the page on our main website about the Kidwell family notebook.

We’re not overstating the case when we say that this book is essential to understanding the migration of Maryland (and Virginia) Catholics to Kentucky in the years following the Revolutionary War, and in understanding the foundations of Roman Catholicism in Kentucky and the rest of the Midwest.

The copy of Catholicity in Kentucky that we scanned to produce this project is unique: it was owned by one I. A. Spalding — and we assume that the owner’s name was Ignatius A. Spalding. The footnote on page 109 of the book mentions three descendants of Benedict Spalding with this name. These were the Ignatius A. Spalding who married Ann Pottinger, and his son and grandson. One of these men — and we are not likely to ever know which one — annotated this particular copy of Catholicity in Kentucky, making a number of corrections and additions in names and places. All his annotations are legible in the scanned copy.

You can find this one available for free download elsewhere on the web, but we think that if you’re serious about this topic we’ve got some compelling reasons why you’ll want our download.

CLICK HERE to go to the page on our main website about Catholicity in Kentucky.

Bishop Flaget

So, we invite you to learn more about the Kidwell Family and Kentucky Catholicity by going to this page about both.

We’ve undertaken the process of republishing the contents of our discontinued CD-ROM “Rhode Island Collection #1” with the re-issuance of Early Records of Warwick, Rhode Island as a download.

This is quite a remarkable document (all 362 pages of it). Probably originally recorded in his own shorthand by the Honorable Rev. Samuel Gorton, the first governor of that specific colony, it is a comprehensive compendium of the minutiae that the local council dealt with, ranging from disputes over land to the ear-marks that distinguished each citizen’s cattle.

It’s not an easy read due to the meticulous accuracy the compiler devoted to it — she is faithful to original spellings and what today we would consider grammatical errors — but if you have ancestors from that area in the period just following 1640, this is pretty much a “most have”. There are no fewer than four indices included in the book.

One note: there are free versions of Early Records of Warwick, Rhode Island available online, and we encourage you to examine them to see if they meet your needs. Our scans are ultra high resolution, and the PDF format is superior to many e-book formats, however, so we’re not embarrassed to ask $3.50 for our download.

To learn more about this important document, and to follow our progress converting our earlier CD-ROM to downloads, please click HERE to go to the appropriate page of our main website. If you are interested in our Rhode Island material in general, please check our main Rhode Island page HERE.

Here’s a genealogy, done some time ago by Between the Lakes Group partner Judith Sherman, that’s been hiding in plain sight for a number of years. We had planned to publish it years ago, but the manuscript got buried, and time passed, and we just uncovered it yesterday!

Here’s the sales blurb:

Gabriel Jackson of Polk County, North Carolina: one line of descent

by Judith Moore Sherman (Brown) (1987)

We think that this work, by one of the partners of Between the Lakes Group, will be helpful for two reasons (beyond the careful scholarship that went into its preparation).

First, genealogy in the mountains of western North Carolina is outright difficult to research. The area was too transient for too long, and largely with people for whom the written word may have historically been more of an enemy than a friend. The extent to which government in the form of records of vital statistics was present was at best limited. That religious communities in the area were continually in flux for many reasons, but in large measure because of a lack of well-educated clergy, largely eliminated the other usual source of genealogical source material. The area, while not subject to depredations during the Civil War, had a disadvantage nonetheless: division of loyalties between the north and the south. That this family produced a southern lieutenant while many or most of the names in the book are more closely associated with northern sympathizers serves to illustrate the point

Second, Jackson is a very common name. While the difficulty attending research of names like Brown and Smith and Jones and Johnson are well known, the Jackson surname has certainly been among the 10 most common in the United States, and it was especially true at this time.

The document is available as a downloaded PDF file. It’s 80 pages long and includes ancestry charts and an index of names. We offer it for $7.50. Please click the “Buy Now” button to download the document to your computer.

…and here’s what we’re trying!

Normally, when we sell something here on our blog, we refer people to our main website. That seems like the usual practice, but it occurred to us that we don’t really need to cause you the extra work.

So, we decided to see how it might work if we offered the possibility of buying this download right here! The price is the same ($7.50) but it’s a little more efficient, we think.

If the genealogy is of interest, try the easy way of getting it. Just click the “Buy Now” button and get the download immediately.

Virtually all local history material is of value to genealogists and historians. Only in the past year or two, however, have the large genealogy companies (ancestry.com, for example) hit on the quantity and quality of genealogical and historical material contained in high school and college yearbooks and annuals. And, they have begun to offer copies of some of these on their websites.

We’re happy to say that we were more than a decade ahead of the giants in recognizing the importance of yearbooks and in beginning their re-publication here at Between the Lakes Group.

Because of all the recent attention directed to yearbooks, we decided to list all of the yearbooks available from us, in the order of the year the yearbook was originally published, all on a single page. There you’ll also find links to the location on our site you can find more information about them. You can see that list on our Yearbooks page — just CLICK HERE to review it.

We’ll have a few posts on the subject of yearbooks — particularly high school yearbooks — and how you can use them. For what? Well, for starters, to fill out the lives of people you may be researching, to learn more about the communities you’re interested in, and even to establish an elusive connection to a family member. Those posts will come as we write them in the next few days and weeks, so check back here for them.

The occasion that really prompted this page was our republication of the Port Jervis, NY High School yearbook for 1938, “Senior Memoirs”. A pretty hefty yearbook (as they go) at 138 pages, with a few rarities in it (such as senior horoscopes to supplement the more standard Last Will and Testament section, and, hearkening back to yearbooks of two or three decades earlier, prize stories and poems), it is one of several Port Jervis High School yearbooks that we have republished. It can be found on our Orange County, NY page.

(You’ll also see there the very first appearance of our snappy new “buy now” button!)

In a word, yes. A fellow names John Hodgkin (sometimes also spelled Hodke) immigrated circa 1648 from England, settling in Guilford, Connecticut. He married and raised a family. And his descendents commonly used the three variants in this post’s title for their surnames, but, just to keep things interesting, also pluralized the first two of these on occasion, so one occasionally finds Hodgkins and Hotchkins as individual surnames. Compounding the problems, from a genealogical perspective, is the fact that a man named Samuel Hotchkiss arrived in New Haven proper around the same time. Samuel also produced a large family, but they at least stuck to Hotchkiss as a surname pretty generally.

If your reaction so far is a big “so what?” it’s not entirely a surprise. Back in the day spelling of surnames (and pretty much everything else) was an opportunity to exercise one’s creativity, so deviant spellings of surnames are a dime a dozen, really.

However, there were a few aspects of this family that are a bit more interesting than that.

First of all, how’s your British (and American colonial) history? John Hodgkin came here as part of a migration of Puritans from England — the fact that he settled in Connecticut rather than Massachusetts Bay Colony suggests that he was probably a very strict Puritan as well. He appears in the records as “Governor Leete’s man” so we find no reason that he would not have fit this pattern. Fast forward a few years, until the Puritan takeover (think Oliver Cromwell) in England, when the victors decided to execute the King they had deposed. The judges on that court became known, after the monarchy was restored, as the Regicides (and king-killing is not favorably viewed by monarchists in general).

So, unsurprisingly, the hunt for the Regicides began. Two, named Whalley and Goffe, had fled to New England (they were fortunate to get out of England alive) (for a list of all the Regicides and what happened to them, try Wikipedia). Since New England was still a British colony, they had not outrun the law, however, and the King’s agents searched for them here. They were spirited from house to house, from community to community, even from colony to colony — and one of their stopovers was with John Hodgkin and his family.

The Hodgkin/Hotchkin/etc. family tended, in subsequent generations, to produce clergymen, a few of whom developed well-deserved reputations as writers, and others of whom developed reputations for other things.

The writers included the Rev. James Hervey Hotchkin, who wrote an early history about the settlement of Western New York State (which we have re-published on CD-ROM — find more information HERE); and the Rev. S. F. Hotchkin (he defied family tradition and became an Episcopal priest) who wrote a series of local history books about Philadelphia and the surrounding area — we plan to republish one of these soon.

Less savory were Hotchkin clergymen who sided against a Connecticut girl marrying a Hawaiian native to the extent that he led a schism in the local Congregational church, and another who had a missionary interest in Native American and black women in the South around the time of the Civil War. He is notable not because he saved many souls, but because his ministrations to these unfortunate women produced a branch of the family referred to today as the Black Hotchkins.

John Hodgkin (Hotchkin) of Guilford, CT and his Descendents

All of this is prelude to the fact that the principal partner of Between the Lakes Group, along with a number of hard working and intelligent family members, back in the 1980s, produced a book entitled “John Hodgkin (Hotchkin) of Guilford, CT and his descendents”. The book sold out two printings in hard cover almost immediately — there are indeed many descendents of John Hotchkin, or at least many people who want to know about his and the family he produced — and now we have re-published it in digital form as a download. If you go HERE to our New Haven, CT page, you can learn more about this download — and perhaps enjoy a copy of your own.

(We should add that unlike some in the genealogy biz, we believe that all lines, male and female, legitimatized by matrimony or not, deserve to be followed. In preparing this book we followed this practice, and we hope that you appreciate this and understand that as a result there are some surnames appearing in the index nearly as frequently as Hotchkin does — Beers is an example.)

Yup, Noah Cross was the progenitor of a whole bunch of people named “Cross” as well as a whole bunch who were, after a generation or two, NOT named Cross. Back in the days that we were celebrating the bicentennial of the United States, a lot of families got busy doing their genealogy, and the descendents of Noah Cross were no different.

And, the descendents of Noah Cross were more successful than most! Thanks mainly to the efforts of one Loyal Cross, one of Noah’s descendents, as well as a few other hard workers, in 1976 a “book” of the descendents of Noah Cross was published. We use the word “published” advisedly for a couple of reasons. First of all, there was no sense at that time that this compendium was a finished product. They had not traced all his lines of descendents. They had not yet gotten him back “across the pond”. And the “book” was mimeographed and designed to be kept in a three ring binder for the frequent updates everyone was sure would come soon and in quantity. Also, the “book” lacked an index.

One of our first tasks in the genealogical community was to index the Cross family book. It was a lot of work, but at least the book had an index, and it was possible to find people in it. We Xeroxed the index and send copies of it to a few people, and it seemed to get a life of its own — but this was a decade after the book itself had been circulated.

Around the same time, another researcher was able to fill in some important blanks about Noah Cross, and the story got about 300% more exciting. It seems that he was born in Somerset, England. In his late teens, he found himself a soldier in the British Army, in a regiment of foot (that means infantry). (We don’t know what his decision process regarding joining the Army was, or even whether he had much say in the process, and we frankly suspect the latter.)

Soon, he found himself (and his regiment) stationed on Long Island, New York. Whether he found Army life intolerable or whether he saw opportunity as only a young man can in a new land is not something we are ever likely to know the answer to. But we do know that he, along with two of his buddies, deserted and made their way to Ulster County, NY. (We should say here that deserting from the Army was not then and is not today a risk-free activity — back in those days if you were caught you likely would have been executed.)

We do not know how Noah Cross and his buddies made it from present day Nassau County, NY across the East River (or the Long Island Sound) and then across the Hudson River and sixty miles upstate. He was likely to have had very little money and must have had to try to stay out of the clutches of those who might return him to the Army. But somehow the three of them did make it up into the Shawangunk Mountains of Ulster County, where he and his friends became acquainted with girls of Dutch heritage whose families lived there.

Now, there is no reason why the Dutch families would have been eager to turn the deserters in. After all, these families had put down roots in New York when it was still New Amsterdam and likely resented the British. Also, these were three fit young men, well able to marry their daughters and contribute to the community. The three deserters married the three Dutch girls not many months after deserting.

Along came the Revolutionary War. Noah Cross enlisted — quite possibly he was urged strongly to do so by his new family — and served. He and his wife had children, and eventually he died. But the rest of the story is in the book, and you may just want to have a look at it.

Who knows? You might find your name or the name of one of your relatives!!